


A Common Enemy

by unicyclehippo



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-17 22:38:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3546320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicyclehippo/pseuds/unicyclehippo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From a prompt: the Sky People find out about the missile and turn on Clarke. Lexa saves her. And it kind of evolved from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Common Enemy

_You liken your anger to fire - you can feel it burning, licking hot at your stomach, up your throat. You take a breath to calm it but don't you know fire thrives on oxygen. You're keeping yourself alive so you can burn to death._

//

"I am in charge here," Clarke told them. 

She was at the end of her tether - she didn't know how much longer she could hold onto the rage that still bubbled close to the surface of her skin (each time she swallowed it, it burnt like acid and she wanted to scream and never stop screaming) but she had to keep it down, lock it deep, because these were her people. Not her enemy. Never her enemy. 

They had too many of those already. 

"I'm not sure you  _should_ be in charge," the Chancellor answered, stepping into Clarke's space. And that space was filled with 'don't do it' and 'don't say it' but Abby didn't hear or didn't care because she prodded Clarke with "Not after what happened in Tondc" and she must want to see Clarke hurt for what happened - must want to know that her daughter, her little girl,  _could_ still hurt after everything she had done - because she pressed again, "Not after the missile." _  
_

"Hey. Leave her alone." Raven, of all people, stood with her. Limped forward to take a place next to Clarke. "That was Mount Weather. She couldn't do anything about it."

"Yes she could. She  _knew_."

The certainty in the Chancellor's voice gave pause to everyone listening. Worried looks slipped between the Ark citizens like mud, marking each of them, and Clarke saw it all as she waited for her to deny it.

"Clarke, go on. Tell her she's crazy. It's not true!" Raven yelled, jutting her chin out, and she waited. "Clarke," she said again, waiting, but then there was a hand on her arm and she frowned, turned to examine Clarke's profile, look at the stilling hand. "Clarke?"

"I can't," she said. She was straight backed and all cold, all harsh. She had to be. (The alternative was spitting, furious, burning - and that, she couldn't be. Not with them.)

"You know?" a voice called out from the crowd. Clarke couldn't see who it was. It didn't matter. Technically, it was from all of them, all of them with upturned faces and frowns growing darker and hands clenching. 

"Yes."

Her mother was hesitating then because even she could tell what she had started, what she had begun, was something more than she could control. Too late. It was out and the people were hungry (you were right, she had to think, the dead are gone and the living are hungry) for answers, for justice, for blood with advancing steps and raised voices of "my husband was in Tondc" and "my wife" "my brother" "you let those people die" all voices raised in pain and hurt and anger and those were people that, like her, had fury too close to the surface to be able to do anything other than burn and want to burn her with them. 

Clarke held steady, eyes brushing over each face in the advancing line. They had their hands on their weapons, armed against Mount Weather, no enemy there anymore. Just her. They weren't anything other than an army in that moment - no, a mob, with mob mentality (string her up, cut her down, make her  _pay_ ) - and they stepped closer and closer. 

"What were you thinking?"

"Justice will be done," the Chancellor started. "Two hundred people and more died in that attack and we saved who we could." She faced them, not Clarke, and held her hands out for peace. "Clarke will answer to-" and her words were swallowed in the roar and step of the mob. 

"I know what happened, Chancellor. I was there."

"You did die there though!" Anguish ripped that voice from the crowd. "You ran."

"Yes." There was nowhere to run now. She thought about it. She did. Eighteen and scared, of course she thought of running. But nowhere to go and maybe she deserved it. "Commander Lexa and I left. I am not proud of it."  _This is wrong_. She remembered saying that. She remembered the way it tasted to say it, knowing like Lexa did that it was the only way. "I did what I had to do. To get our people out." She wasn't stopping their advance. But she was finally letting herself believe, understand, what she was saying and seeing the faces of the forty-one she had managed to save, she settled the cost of it inside her and it didn't balance but she would live with it. "If Lexa had died, if I had died, the alliance would be over. We would never have rescued them." They were right there, right in front of her. A hand flew at her and she knocked it aside, gripping that wrist tight. "I saved  _your son_ ," she told him. "By myself. When you retreated with the rest of them and they were in danger, I was the one who walked in and brought them out."

"At what cost?"

"Two hundred lives!"

"More!"

"Killer" "killed Finn too" " _Murderer_."

Clarke stood against the barrage - her mother's face disappeared, white and scared, inside the crowd as she struggled and was removed - and it wasn't until the first hand gripped her that the last strand, the last of the stillness, snapped and they were rushing at her and all was bedlam. 

"No, stop," she heard from her side, but then Raven too was gone and she was lifted off her feet and for a moment her eyes showed black - a blow to her cheek, she thought. 

And then she was bleeding anew. She had had enough of bleeding, when would it be over, when would it be enough? (This earth is thirsty). It reopened the cut on her forehead and her body jarred where it was slammed against the tree behind her.

"I tried," she told them. A knife nicked her side and Clarke twisted the hand that held it, turned it away. "I didn't have a choice." Her voice cracked like so much jagged rocks and sharded glass, sharp, dangerous. With her history, she didn't know who it was most dangerous for. "I did what I had to do."

"And now we are doing the same."

Her head was ringing, reeling, when the first arrow struck the bark of the tree.

The second sliced long across the arm of the man who dared to hold Clarke in place.

The third - and many others - were aimed at those who hurt and tried to hurt her. 

"Let her go."

Clarke tensed in violent hands, hands wrapped around her throat. She could not stay go, nor leave, nor don't help me because she wanted her to stay and help and never to leave but even those wants dragged sharp and hurtful when she thought them. 

"Let her go," Commander Lexa repeated and she raised her hand to give the command to her soldier to loose the arrow. The man who held Clarke now, knife to throat, would be the first to fall. 

Before she could, a knee to the groin and an elbow to the temple sent him to the ground.

Clarke took the knife from the fallen man. "I do not need your help, Commander." Blood dripped over her brow, down her cheek, in a terrible vision and Lexa nodded. "Not now. I needed your help then, but not here with my own people."

"They want to kill you." Lexa moved through the crowd until she stood in front of Clarke. "I will not let them do that."

"They are my people to command." Her words didn't feel as sure, as strong, coming through a bruised throat. But no matter. "They're not yours."

"They will have your blood," Lexa said though there was coldness in the sky eyes and she could only nod then and turn to face the mob. Clarke did not want her help, would not listen, but so be it. She drew her sword. They fell silent in front of her and listened for her low voice. "Some of you - those kept in the mountain and hung next to mine - you know what the men of the mountain would have done to you. They would take from you not your lives but they would take your blood, your bones. There would be nothing left for your people to burn." Murmurs broke out in the space between her words. "We knew the missile was coming. Both of us." There was a scuffle to the side - one man stepped forward and was pushed back by a grounder, held in place. "Your Princess wished to save them. She wanted to save your people and mine. But in every war there are sacrifices to be made and battles to lose and to keep our spy secret and safe, they could know know what we knew. To keep you alive," her gaze hardened where it rested on the bandaged, bloodied few on the sidelines who shivered and hurt, who were marked by the holes in their hips, and she felt her lips tighten in an anger she would not show otherwise because they had not moved to help Clarke though she had moved heaven and earth to help them. "We could not save them," she said. 

"You're giving us that sacrifice the few to save the many crap? Are you serious?" The man - Clarke recognised him as a worker, factory - rallied against the grounder that blocked him. "You let them all  _die_ and you saved yourself. Typical privileged crap." His spit marked the ground. 

"We did. Do you challenge us?" Lexa moved down to stand in front of him. "Do you wish to take up sword and challenge me? Say you won." She tried not to scoff at the idea and lowered her voice, issuing her own challenge to him. "What would you have done in my stead?"

"I wouldn't have let them die."

"A noble thought. Tell me, how would you have saved them."

"I would have made them leave." His frown was dark and his tone darker still and perhaps he had more to say, perhaps he didn't, but then Clarke was laughing and it was not a pleasant sound. It was hysteria and hurt and it was anything but humour, or perhaps the darkest form of it. 

"Good," she laughed. "You just made the decision to kill everyone inside the mountain. You got them bled and killed and it's over."

"They wouldn't have known."

"No, of course not. Not with cameras everywhere and a spotter in the trees." Clarke clenched her jaw. Was done with sarcasm, with leniency. "They would have known the second people started to leave," she told him. "And we would have nothing to show for it after they killed them all and started on us."

"But you would've been fine, wouldn't you? You would make everyone keep you alive. Why? Why do you get to live? So many people are dead but here you are, fine, not a scratch on you."

"Because she is your princess," Lexa snarled. And because he could not see some hurts were deeper and lasted far longer than any scar. She could. But Clarke did not want commentary on those hurts. "I have seen her. She is a warrior and a leader. She is born to it and I will not deal with another."

"You won't deal?" He laughed in her face and spat at her feet and it was only the presence of Clarke that meant Lexa did not kill him where he stood for disrespecting her twice over. "We won't deal with you."

The grounders Lexa had brought with her shed the shadows they kept and stepped out, a force twice the size of the Ark's people. "It is in your best interest to reconsider that," Lexa told him.

"We don't want you. And we don't want her." His finger jabbed through the air at Clarke. Lexa broke it. But his wail did not discourage others from echoing his sentiment. 

"Go with the grounders, traitor."

"We don't want you."

There was not a single friendly face there for Clarke. She searched but all that met her was a reflection of her own face and she read the condemnation there - monster, traitor, killer, murderer,  _monster_. She nodded. 

"Fine." She allowed Lexa's hand to hold her up when she moved. It hurt there, burned through her skin, and she wanted to rip away but stumbling, falling, in front of the others would be worse. "Will you keep my people safe?" she asked Lexa.

"They are not yours if they will not-"

"They are my people, commander. And I will protect them. So. Will you keep them safe?"

"So long as they do not turn on mine, they will not be harmed," Lexa promised in front of those anxious, bloodied faces. "But Clarke," she could not ask them to leave them, because if they were her people then they were her people and Lexa understood the role, but she could ask Clarke to stand by her side. "Come with me to Polis." She held out her other hand, inviting Clarke to take it. "Come with me. You may keep yours safe, and I can show you the wonder of mine."

"No." And that was all. 

Clarke searched the crowd for Lincoln. She found him at the edge, stepping through the mass and he nodded when he met her eyes and Octavia beside him had cold eyes and monster written into the gnash of her teeth but she nodded too. "I am going to look for the other survivors of the Ark." She lifted her head and met the eyes of everyone who had advanced against her. "Stay safe." And then, very quietly. "May we meet again."

Lexa strode next to her when she turned. She was not used to the role of caretaker but she was familiar with commander and her command was simple. "Rest, Clarke. You are injured." Then, in an attempt at gentle because after everything Clarke at least deserved an attemp, "Let me help you."

"No. I am resting here for tonight but then I am gone. And Commander - if you do not keep my people safe, the alliance is through. And I will come for you myself. Clear?"

Lexa held tight to Clarke's elbow for a moment before she nodded. Stepped away. The boundaries were set. Commander and Leader. Commander, with an army. Leader with five (her general would follow her, the warrior she stole from Lexa and Lincoln's Octavia too, the girl with the metal leg and the burning heart, and the meek boy that drifted from the bloodied group to Clarke's side, greeting her with a hug, and perhaps others beside would join her in the morning but in that moment she was as strong as she ever was - so brilliantly, painfully strong past her breaking point - and Lexa did not let herself think of love).

She and Clarke were different now, harsher, and they could be no more than what they were. There would be no blurring of lines or lingering looks. But though her heart hurt and was heavy by that, she could understand. Betrayal dug those lines and boundaries into hard rock and would never fade. She could not begrudge Clarke her space or time to feel her own hurt and understand her mistrust. She nodded again. "Take five of my men with you," she offered. "They are yours, to keep you safe."

"Your offer is generous," Clarke said, cold as stranger to stranger. 


End file.
